This final tutorial in this series teaches you how to use Active Server Pages scripts to store information into a database as well as retrieve information from a database and display that information in a user's browser.

After completing this tutorial you should be able to do the following:

Write an Active Server Pages insert script that takes the information from
an HTML form and stores that information in a database

Implement simple error-handling code for your insert script

Write an Active Server Pages retrieve script that takes information out
of a database and formats a nice display of that information in a user's
browser

Explain and diagram how HTML forms, Active Server Pages, SQL, and databases
work together to create an interactive, database-driven web application

Introduction

We've reached the final tutorial! In the previous tutorial, you learned
how to get information from your users via an HTML form (Tutorial 4). Before
that, you learned how to create a database (Tutorial 2) and communicate with
your database in a special language known as SQL (Tutorial 3). In this
final tutorial, we'll cover what we like to call the "keystone"
technology—Active Server Pages (ASP) scripts. In a database-driven,
interactive web application, ASP scripts perform two key functions: 1) inserting
the information from an HTML form into your database; and 2) retrieving information
from your database and displaying that information in your user's web browser.
The first function uses an ASP insert script; the second function uses an ASP
retrieve script.
Figure 1 shows
how this looks as part of our conceptual diagram.

Note: To download a zip containing the source files for this article, click
here.

We should point out that you don't have to write your scripts in ASP.
There are other scripting languages, such as Perl, Cold Fusion, or PHP. However,
ASP is the easiest language to learn and, more importantly, has great database
connectivity. If you're writing interactive, database-driven web
applications, you can't go wrong using ASP; almost anything you can do in
the other scripting languages, you can do with ASP.